Think of writers who are intimately associated with a particular city: Kafka and Prague, Joyce and Dublin, Svevo and Trieste... or Pessoa and Lisbon. Pessoa did for Lisbon something which few other leading writers have done for their home city. He wrote a guide for tourists visiting the city. With Pessoa to hand, Iain Bamforth sets out to explore the Portuguese capital.

article summary —

As the poet Fernando Pessoa would tell
you, there is no better time to visit Lisbon
— “luminous Lisbon” to Pessoa — than
winter. At that season, the sun is slant, the light
weak and diffuse, the streets mostly empty, and the
rain gusting in from the Atlantic Ocean sleeks the
pavements with a damp skein which turns them a
grey mother-of-pearl. Visitors who favour leathersoled
shoes discover, as they walk the seven hills of
Lisbon, that the streets of the Portuguese
capital are paved with fine, pale, slippery
stones.

I slipped of course. Everyone does.
But not everyone who falls on Lisbon pavements
is carrying Pessoa with them. In
one hand I held the appropriately named
The Book of Disquiet. I was ill-advisedly
trying to open an origami popout map
of Lisbon with the other hand. From the
discomfort of the hard pavement, I could
observe Lisbon from an unusual angle.
It was a Pessoan moment, for no-one
specialised more than Pessoa in observing
and recording Lisbon life from unusual
angles.

***

Lisbon’s air “is a hidden yellow, a kind
of pale yellow seen through dirty white.
There is scarcely any yellow in the grey
air. But the paleness of the grey has
a yellow in its sadness,” according to
Bernardo Soares, putative author of
The
Book of Disquiet
.

For the traveller who comes in from the sea, Lisbon, even from afar, rises like a fair vision in a dream, clear-cut against a bright blue sky which the sun gladdens with its gold. And the domes, the monuments, the old castles jut up above the mass of houses, like far-off heralds of this delightful seat, of this blessed region.From ‘Lisbon: What the Tourist Should See’ by Fernando Pessoa

But the term ‘author’ is a contestable one in
Pessoa’s literary world. Pessoa wrote
The Book of
Disquiet
but ascribed it to a clerk called Bernardo
Soares who existed only in Pessoa’s imagination.
To sustain the fable that Soares was the ‘real’
author of The Book of Disquiet, Pessoa even wrote a
preface to the book in his own name.

Bernardo Soares was Pessoa’s alter ego, an
assistant bookkeeper who lived in a rented room
and worked for a textile trading firm in the Rua dos Douradores, close to Pessoa’s own workplace.
It is one of the drabber streets in the bustling
commercial district of Baixa.

Here is Soares’ take on the road he calls
home: “I know: if I raise my eyes, I’ll be confronted
by the sordid row of buildings opposite, the grimy
windows of all the downtown offices, the pointless
windows of the upper floors where people still
live, and the eternal laundry hanging in the sun
between the gables at the top, among flower-pots
and plants.”

Not much happens in Rua dos Douradores
except for the occasional sound of someone
practising scales. The washing still hangs between
the gables. Just as Soares observed.

This is just an excerpt. The full text of this article is not yet available to members with online access to hidden europe. Of course you can also read the full article in the print edition of hidden europe 46.

Iain Bamforth is a much-travelled doctor of medicine and of letters, whose work has appeared in many periodicals, including ‘Quadrant‘, ‘London Review of Books’, ‘Times Literary Supplement’ and ’Lapham’s Quarterly’. His latest collection of essays is ‘The Good European’ (Carcanet, 2006), and he is currently preparing a volume of poems for publication in autumn 2012.

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